A time for planting, a time for singing

I completed phase two of a lawn conversion project this spring. In phase one, which was installed last year, we planted with plugs – small, young plants with good roots but not much to show up top. In phase two, we used larger, vigorous plants that come in litre and gallon pots.

Last year’s specimens, thanks in part to the careful tending by the homeowner, had grown almost as big as the new ones we put in this year. There were flowers on both – hairy beardtongue in 2025’s, foxglove beardtongue in 2026’s.

You can use small plants and wait, or you can use large plants and get an instant effect. Small plants are cheap. Large plants, as you’d expect, cost more.
You pay to shortcut time.

Happening

Lucas House in Haliburton village was planted three years ago. I have a picture on my website of the 1,200 plugs I added that May.

The first year was patchy, the second a bit better and the third completely full.

Each year it has looked different. The 2026 incarnation is a tapestry of texture with plants finding their way, jostling against their neighbours, growing on top of each other. The pearly everlasting is creating drifts, the silverweed is spreading into the path by the sculptures, the wild strawberry is filling gaps. The little bluestem plants are touching and between them the mountain mint is starting to flower.
This is what I’d hoped would happen, but it was time that did it.

Hope

Eight years ago I planted a screen of dogwood shrubs at my home. I say shrubs, they were sticks – bare roots and a couple of stems. Very cheap if you buy them by the score.

In the first year, nothing happened. Not much happened in the second year, either, except deer munched the leaf buds over winter.

But now I have a screen, with the dogwood flowering and making berries.

Those first years are hard. You have no idea if what you’re doing will work. You hope the roots are growing but you don’t know because you can’t see.
You have to put your trust in time.

Done

A garden is never done. That’s not the impression you get on the TV makeover shows, with their “reveal” of a completed landscaping project.

It looks done but it’s not. It will keep growing and over time will become something else.

Instead of being done, you’re stepping into a process that started long before you put a shovel into the ground and will continue long after you’re gone.

Your garden is like a river. The one you wade into today is not the river you waded into yesterday.

Song

Last week I was tending a landscape I installed two years ago. I did some weeding, some monitoring, some trimming.

It was a sunny day and I could smell the warm grass and hear the bees. The Ohio spiderwort was putting out the last of its flowers, the lanceleaf coreopsis was budding. I pinched the leaves of the wild bergamot and caught their scent on my fingertips.

And as I tended the garden, I found myself singing. It was the same tuneless wandering my grandfather sang as he tended his roses 40 years ago.